The redrawing of District boundries will have no impact on the Presidential election, but it seriously effects the potential composition of the US House of Representatives. The Representatives (aka, Members of the House) are chosen by a majority vote within their Districts, and these are what have been changed in a few states (Texas is, I think, the worse situation) to make a Republican victory more likely. The District boundries are set by the states themselves and this is something that goes on, in those few places that tend to do so, every time the state legislatures have a significant majority of one party or another. Its the "you screwed us over last time so we'll get you this time" mentality.

The Electoral College is an arcane system of counting presidential votes in a state, and the system is not the same in all states. States have a varying number of electoral votes, depending primarily (but not entirely) on their population. In most, all of the electoral votes go to the candidate for president who gets the largest percentage of the popular vote. That is, if a state has 10 electoral votes, and Kerry gets 46%, Bush gets 43%, Nader gets 5%, and other minority candidates get the rest, than Kerry gets all ten votes. A few states divide up their electoral votes according to the percentage breakdown of the popular vote.

So, as in CarolC's situation, if a person lives in a state where one of the majority candidates gets all of the electoral votes, then a vote for the other person counts for absolutely nothing in the overall election process. This is what actually happened in 2000, and in a number of previous presidential elections; one candidate (Gore) received more of the popular vote while the other (Bush) received the majority of the electoral votes and thus won the election.

This system was set up about 220 years ago, primarily in reaction to what the British-born framers of our Constitution thought was an overly complicated and corrupt system in their former country. Go figure.